Dorothy Kneedler Lawenda, design icon, dies

Bernadette Fay, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published
4:00 am PST, Wednesday, December 17, 2008

obit photo of Dorothy Kneedler Lawenda, who co-founded the design showroom Kneedler-Fauchere in San Francisco in 1948 and spearheaded one of the nation?s first design districts, Jackson Square in San Francisco, has died. She was 94. less

obit photo of Dorothy Kneedler Lawenda, who co-founded the design showroom Kneedler-Fauchere in San Francisco in 1948 and spearheaded one of the nation?s first design districts, Jackson Square in San Francisco, ... more

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obit photo of Dorothy Kneedler Lawenda, who co-founded the design showroom Kneedler-Fauchere in San Francisco in 1948 and spearheaded one of the nation?s first design districts, Jackson Square in San Francisco, has died. She was 94. less

obit photo of Dorothy Kneedler Lawenda, who co-founded the design showroom Kneedler-Fauchere in San Francisco in 1948 and spearheaded one of the nation?s first design districts, Jackson Square in San Francisco, ... more

Photo: Family Photo, Same

Dorothy Kneedler Lawenda, design icon, dies

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Dorothy Kneedler Lawenda, who co-founded the design showroom Kneedler-Fauchere in San Francisco in 1948 and spearheaded one of the nation's first design districts, Jackson Square in San Francisco, has died. She was 94.

Mrs. Kneedler Lawenda, who died Thursday at her Los Angeles home, was born in 1914 in San Francisco, was interned in a concentration camp in the Philippines during World War II, married twice, bore five children and moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s where she helped establish the Pacific Design Center.

"She was always an innovator, particularly in San Francisco," said her daughter Wendy Kneedler-Senior, who said her mother had an "innate sense of style and design."

"Dorothy had so many fantastic, creative ideas," said John McGuire, 89, who founded McGuire Furniture in postwar San Francisco when Mrs. Kneedler Lawenda was getting started importing and selling grass and silk wallpapers from Japan and the Philippines from her first tiny showroom in the lobby of the Marines Memorial Theatre on Sutter Street.

"Dorothy was very wise, very competent, very smart," McGuire said. "She built that little wallpaper stall into Kneedler-Fauchere, which was very important in interior design in California."

Mrs. Kneedler Lawenda, ever the entrepreneur, recognized the need for one location where designers could gather, and she started poking around the derelict warehouses on Jackson Street.

"Dorothy really discovered the empty warehouse buildings on Jackson Street," McGuire said. "Without any question or doubt, she conceived the whole thing and made it happen," he said of what became the Jackson Square district. "We were just lucky she dragged us along."

She married Edgar Kneedler in 1938 in the Swedenborgian Church in San Francisco. The couple honeymooned in the Philippines and stayed on so Kneedler could manage the luxury Bayview Park Hotel in Manila, which his father owned. In 1941, the Japanese invasion ended the party. The couple and their young daughter, Ann, were imprisoned at the Santo Tomas internment camp in Manila and endured brutal conditions.

Mrs. Kneedler Lawenda, pregnant with her son Douglass, was eventually allowed to relocate with her family to the French compound outside Manila. It was there that she met Lucienne Fauchere, a young Frenchwoman whose fiance had been killed in the war.

In 1945, the Kneedlers were repatriated to the United States, and Fauchere came with them. Mrs. Kneedler Lawenda's marriage did not survive the war. She and her husband divorced, and she became a single parent, now with three young children. But she was "always a forerunner," Kneedler-Senior said, noting that her mother had gotten her driver's license at 16 and proceeded to "have a ball - as she always did."

That spirit drove her work. She and her partner, Fauchere, opened their showroom at the Marines Memorial selling imported wall coverings, and the rest, as they say, is history. In 1949, she interviewed and hired a young man from New York who had trained at the Parsons design school. When Fauchere left the business, Harry Lawenda became her partner "in marriage and business," Kneedler-Senior said.

They were married for 58 years and had two sons, Kevin and Kent.

As their business grew, the company left Jackson Square for the Ice House near the Embarcadero and then the Galleria, where Kneedler-Fauchere still has a showroom. Later, the couple moved to Los Angeles and represented innovators such as interior designer Angelo Donghia and woodworker Sam Maloof. Kneedler-Fauchere was one of the first tenants at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood. Just last month, Dorothy and Harry Lawenda were honored with the 2008 Design Leadership Award from the Decorative Arts and Design Council of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

In addition to her husband, Mrs. Kneedler Lawenda is survived by three children from her first marriage, Ann Kneedler, Douglass Kneedler and Wendy Kneedler-Senior; two sons from her second marriage, Kent and Kevin Lawenda; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.